Mollie's Musings - An Introduction

With staccato fingers dancing away on the keyboard and a plate of apple and blackberry pie to my side, I’m pretty sure this is the best way I could start my first blog post. My name is Mollie Josephine Berry and my musings are tremors on the verge of an earthquake.

I’ve always found solace in words. Whether they come from a book I’m reading, an article I’m gazing through or uttered through parted lips; words are wonderful. We can string them together and fashion them with the odd comma or full stop to make sentences, which stationed one after the other like jenga bricks make paragraphs which turn into chapters which combine together to make a story. And stories are what our civilisation is found upon. We tell stories to pass on history, we tell stories to entertain and we can even tell stories to moralise our audience.

A good story, I believe, starts with a purpose. It doesn’t matter what that purpose is but I figure that people start telling stories for a reason. Something triggered the itch to get up, grab a pen and scribble down a plot. Stories can be bad and stories can be perspective altering – in other words magical. But a story isn’t defined by how good it is. Just because I couldn’t get through the first few pages of a novel doesn’t mean that someone else, somewhere isn’t grappling through the very same pages in a sudden, desperate urge to get to the end.

The way we respond to stories is almost entirely subjective. I like to read fantasy and stories about worlds that don’t exist. Reading for me, is an escape route into a world of imagination where the rules that society place so heavily on us in the real world don’t apply. Heroes can be heroes and not just for one day like that old David Bowie song says.

Stories can also define a generation. Stories can even define an age. We have the dawn of the Romantics in literature and then we have the rise of the Postmodernists. And then, in less critical terms, we have stories that map out stages of our life. Harry Potter defined the growth of so many from child to adolescent to man. Millions grew up with the books that their childhood can simply be defined as, Harry Potter.

So as you can see words are indeed, as the old mantra goes, more powerful than you think. The art behind words is to use them to bring beauty into the world, not decadence. I’ve never been one to vocalise much and speaking about your thoughts and general musings is a lot harder, I feel, than writing them down. Emma Watson recently revealed that she has 30 journals filled out with memories that she’s had since she was a child. A gift from her grandmother I believe she said, that spawned an age. I don’t have 30 journals to fill out but I do have a blog and in this pixelated world I plan to write and write and write.

I aim to write about books I’ve read, articles I find engaging, music/films/things in general I’m loving right now and your bog-standard lifestyle. What I get up to, the places I’ve been and where I plan to go. As Peter Pan would say, had he been living in the web world of the 21^st century – to blog would be an awfully big adventure; and I’m embarking on it.

Twitter: @Molsie_B
Instagram: Mollie_Not_Molly
Tumblr: http://mollienotmollyx.tumblr.com/